Tom Snarsky is ubiquitous on the internet, and everywhere he is he is sharing poems. On X and on Bluesky, this looks like screenshots of books he’s reading. On Insta and Tik Tok, you can even sometimes hear Tom reading aloud the poems he loves. His latest collection, Reclaimed Water, is available from Ornithopter Press. Kelly in Italics.
Tom, I've been enjoying your second book of poetry, Reclaimed Water. Here's a poem I really like from it:
Xenakis
Hovering, a jump
rope snaked through
stars, pattern mid-
skip changing like a
fortune, five four
three two one and
a kiss at the end.
I have a friend named Xenakis, and then there is the Greek
composer it's a better bet you are referring to—though I'm not sure of that.
Also, I'm intrigued by the echo of "Xenakis" and "snaked."
But this is a thing I like about your poems. Your titles tease. I google them,
I try to place them as fragments of quotations, I wonder about them sometimes
long long after I have read the poem... How do you approach titling your poems?
How do you approach the titles of poems you read? I have heard one reader say
that he never reads the title until after he has read the poem. Do you title
your poems before they are finished? For that matter, do you approach titling
your collections in the same way you title your poems? If it's different, how
is it different?
I’m so glad to hear you like “Xenakis”! It’s a poem I’m really fond of from RW; you know my perennial weakness for the small poem. It’s also wonderful to be asked this question by you in particular, since I love the titles in your chapbook Like Now (“Sousveillance”! “The Aminals”!). Re: titles, one thing I should admit right out is that most of my poems begin like this, a recently-started draft I’m pulling fresh from my Notes app:
A title, or an idea for one, and a little placeholder. Actually, to be more precise, most begin like this:
Some
poems stay with “Poem” as their title, and others end up with no title at all.
Titling is often a space that feels ripe for fiddling with the fun kinds of
distances that are the playthings of poetry, like in this poem by Noelle Kocot
(that could be considered a blueprint for “Xenakis”):
LIGETI
The curse of the fathers. The
Good gift. Now you want to
Mess it all up. The orange
Orange. The movement of
Grace beneath you runs like
An Orphic vision. Your wild
Pulse, what does it affirm?
Ask by implication, ask by gesture.
Don’t touch me, I’m alive.
Rae Armantrout, who I’ve been reading a bunch lately, is really great at this too, cf. “Intercepts” in Eileen Myles’s marvelous Pathetic Literature. I love how, in Kocot’s poem, the title could suggest that the poem exists within a kind of aura or other association with Ligeti’s music, or maybe it’s inviting us to fill Ligeti in as the poem’s addressee: Your wild / Pulse, what does it affirm? I’m interested in titles that sit in this ambiguous limbo, for poems and also for collections. One thing I especially like about deciding on titles for whole books is that you can play, too, with how the title appears (or doesn’t) in the body of the text; Light-Up Swan had no such appearance, Reclaimed Water had a mildly oblique one (in the poem “Confusion Matrix”), and with A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems and a recently-finished book called MOUNTEBANK the title has showed up more straightforwardly. To every thing there is a season.
The internet knows that you can't be around Tom Snarsky for very long without hearing the names of many many poets. I admit that I follow you around and pick up names like a dog after a sloppy eater. I'm interested in how you read. Do you use the library a lot? What's your favorite library? What's your favorite bookstore? Do you live in a smaller apartment so that you can buy more books? Do you read one book front-to-back and then start another, or do you have 13 books-in-progress at any one time? I know you take screenshots of poems, because you post multiple screenshots every day! But do you use highlighters, sticky tabs, do you dog-ear pages? What is it like to be in a house with Tom Snarsky and his books? (Maybe I should be interviewing Kristi instead. There's an idea — the indirect interview.)
A beautiful question! Elsewhere I’ve described my reading habits as magpieish — lots and lots of stacks of books to flit between. Earlier tonight Kristi and I went to sit down for dinner and we realized, between cats on the chairs and books on the table, there was nowhere to eat. I think that’s the succinctest version of what it’s like!
I love used bookstores more than almost any other place in the world. We’re lucky to have a few near us, like Wonder Book and Second Story Books, among many others, that offer books incredibly cheap — and Wonder Book also buys books back, which is essential for when the finiteness of space reasserts itself, as it does. I should use the library a lot more than I do (I did when I was near a college, which I haven’t been since we moved to VA), but in its stead I’m happy in the used-book stacks, wallet be damned.
On the magpieishness, though, one thing that feels important to mention is that I try to be that way with books I’ve already read, or know a little — for a book that is new to me, it feels a lot better to read it cover to cover, and then to return to it in that more scattershot manner once it’s in my bones. That, for me, is the only sustainable way to connect with the voice of a book, to keep it from dispersing into a sequence of disconnected images. There are so many things in the here and now that would tear our attention apart; a poetry collection, or some other thing made of paper & past (I’m reading Philip Levine’s Don’t Ask just now), is like a flimsy bastion that can give us some practice in protecting our attention as long as we find the time to let it. (I think of that scene in Rilke’s novel that’s set in the library, where it’s just Malte and his poet spending the afternoon in a contemplation shared across time and space.)
I'm going to pull some words out of your response. Sustainable. Dispersing. Disconnected. Attention. Flimsy. Bastion. I want to ask you a kind of tricky question, but I think these words might mean that the question is already on your mind. What is the soul of poetry? And I mean specifically not what is poetry and what is not and where is the line. I mean, what is it you love when you love poetry? What does poetry do? For you? What does reading it do? What does writing it do? How are the reading and the writing connected? And what does attention have to do with it? Attention to what?
What is the soul of poetry? The soul of poetry, I think, is like any other soul -- it can be lost, it can be wayward, and if fortune smiles upon it, it can be saved. Whatever it is, it is singular, like the souls of Leibniz's monads or literature's nomads. What I love when I love poetry is what G. K. Chesterton calls, in quite a different context, its "thunderbolt" character -- like a literal thunderbolt it strikes you directly in the head & heart at once, since both need electricity to do their thing, but more metaphorically it descends down the Porphyrian tree of particularity all the way to the very bottom -- almost chancily, like a ball in a pachinko machine -- and gives you the sound of itself, to hear and to let resound in your own ear, its little bones. The poets I love most are so intensely themselves that reading them can sometimes feel like shaking the hand of someone who has a joke buzzer hidden in their palm; there are resonances, and there is the rigidity of where you are as you read them, which the vibrations reveal to be too rigorous, too stiff, quite possibly in need of some shaking up. I think attention comes into this because these vibrations, if you don't really attend to them properly, feel like an annoyance or a kind of beside-the-pointness -- anyone who has read a poet they can't really get into knows what this is like. But with cultivated attention, the single voice ringing out from its little valley of poesy starts to make sound, a signal against the noise of living. And what we learn when we parse that signal, for ourselves -- to me that is the soul of poetry.
Wow. What a generous answer! I really like the joke buzzer image. I am reminded of O'Hara's "Personism," too, which is jokey but at the same time himself and no one else.
I want to ask you about long and short poems. You have a love of the small poem; you write many; and you've started a Sunday social media #smallpoemsunday thing for sharing poems. (It's great!) But I see you move sometimes toward the longer poem. Here's a bit from "Epistle to Hannah Van Binsbergen on 4%" from Light-Up Swan:
I thought I had precious little time
To write this but then I
found a charger
...
Sorry if I'm writing like I
know you
You have every right
"to
keep violence at bay" (title poem tr. Hutchison)
And from "Rare Birds of Massachusetts" from Reclaimed Water:
... The son
was one
of the most beautiful
people
I had ever seen, he made me
speak
badly and break my lines
in obvious ways, on nouns
and verbs, I hated
feeling so simple
because what is more
humiliating
than to be reminded
the thing you want
most in life has only one
part, one speaking role?
John
Wieners's god is like this,
his sound always getting
stolen
or taken away, like the
state
would take your child
if you nailed him to a
tree. ...
Both of these I've quoted from are in the 1st person but have plenty of asides and plenty of attention to what's out there. How do you think about longer poems? Do you harbor an ambition to write your own Paterson or Midwinter Day? What do you enjoy about longer poems — both the reading and the writing of?
I love what I think Jack Underwood calls somewhere the “scopics” of poetry — the way a poem can zoom way in on the tiniest, particularest detail, or can zoom way out on the whole scale of human experience, history, the universe, time…and a poem can be any size while doing all that, only a few lines or a book or beyond. I absolutely love the small poem in no small part because it’s the kind of poem most readily (& easily) held in the heart — I have a number of small poems committed to memory mostly just because of repeated exposure (Molly Brodak, “How To Not Be A Perfectionist”: “People are vivid / and small / and don’t live / very long—“), and I think that’s a really beautiful thing, that the littleness of the poem has caused it to become a part of me osmotically, with no special act of will or committal on my part.
On the other hand, there is something incredibly special about the long poem, too, which mostly for me has to do with duration. I grew up in MA (my folks are still there) and I live now in VA, so it’s not infrequently that I make the commonwealth-to-commonwealth car trip along the East Coast, where I have ~9 hours at a time that could do with a soundtrack. I’ve needed poetry desperately for this, listening to PennSound recordings of John Ashbery reading “The Skaters” or Jack Spicer reading The Holy Grail or Jimmy Schuyler reading whatever or cracking my audiobook app to listen to Ariana Reines read A Sand Book for the umpteenth time. The long poem, like the book of poetry more generally, invites us to sit with one voice long enough that we act as a kind of parallax with it for making sense of the world — the Dr. Melfi to our Tony Soprano, the Vladimir to our Estragon, etc.
I have definitely been tempted by the long poem, although the longest one I’ve ever actually been able to write I think is “A Letter From The Mountain”. There’s a little part of me that believes in that thing I think Poe said, that our lyrical impulse tops out at about half an hour of sustained possibility per sitting, even if we might try to be amenable to the epic or the otherwise extended verse form. I’ve got some long poems I’m quite happy with, though, and maybe there’ll be a considerably longer one someday, so for now I will just be thankful that we are even having this conversation about the long poem in an era where attention feels more fissiparous than ever!
Tom, thank you again for this conversation. I've really been enjoying it, and you've been graciously forthcoming. I want to ask you one last (set of) question(s), and then let your reply close us out.
You're a teacher — high school math, right? — and I believe you have a chapbook of poems about that experience. I bring this up, because one thing I notice about your poetry is the wide scope of subject matter. Parked cop cars, classic rock on the radio, yo-yos, a neon sign, ice cream — these are a few of the things I have found your poems to be "about." I find it's one of the things that draws me back to your poetry, the breadth of it. You do seem to be a real idiosyncratic human person experiencing an entire life and putting more of it than is usual into poetry. Can you close us out with a pair of poems, as you do with #SmallPoemSunday — one from you, one from a poet you love, that you find notices and pays attention to a poetically unusual topic or subject? Take us home with a couple of uncommon encounters. If you please, Maestro.
Thank you for having this conversation with me, J-T! It’s been a pleasure, I’ve really enjoyed it :)
I was a math teacher for 7 years; now I work on developing math curriculum. One thing I love about math is that, ultimately, it makes sense. The cost of this making-sense is that the scope of its reference is extremely narrow — math only looks at objects that are logically pristinely behaved, things amenable to axioms and first-order logic. Poetry is a nice negative space for this ordered realm, I think; a place for the chaos to play, for weird collisions to happen and stack.
I would love to close things out with a couple of small poems à la #smallpoemsunday! as it happens, I’ve drafted the Notes app poem from earlier, so for the poem from me I’ll include that:
for the poem from someone else, I’ll take to heart your request for an unusual subject, and submit this Brandon Downing poem, a longtime favorite:
Ancient Prodigy
Don’t take off all your clothes
and tool around in your hotel
room and expect the dude
with mushrooms sprouting
across his face won’t pop out
and surprise you!
Tom Snarsky is the author of Light-Up Swan and Reclaimed Water, both from Ornithopter Press. His new book A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems is forthcoming from Animal Heart Press in 2025.
